THE HISTORIC VIEWS OF THE CHURCH CONCERNING PRESERVATION
BY
Rev (Dr) P. S. FERGUSON
1
Contents
INTRODUCTION...... 4
I.Reformers and Preservation...... 22
II.Warfield Overturns Historic Position...... 50
III.Preservation Views Today...... 67
CONCLUSION...... 85
1
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
DBSJDetroit Baptist Seminary Journal
KJVKing James Version
CTCritical Text
MTMajority Text
TRTextus Receptus
WCFWestminster Confession of Faith
introduction
The battle for the Word of God is not a new battle. Today, while many of its most vitriolic opponents are in the grave, and the volumes written to discredit it and to overthrow its influence, are forgotten, the Bible has found its way into every major nation and over 2,000 languages of the planet. As Lewis Sperry Chafer wrote, “It is not such a book as man would write if he could, or could write if he would[1].” The fact that this book has survived so many centuries, notwithstanding such unparalleled efforts to destroy it by imperial and papal Rome as well as apostate textual criticism, is strong evidence that God Almighty its Author has also been its Preserver.
The Bible did not appear from a vacuum but was inspired and preserved under the Sovereign control of Almighty God. This includes all natural processes and agencies through which these inspired Words were enscripturated and passed down through the ages. Only God could have inspired Moses to inerrantly record 2,500 years of human history unaided. The Bible has been preserved against all odds, both in its canonicity and in the purity of its contents. Indeed on the two times we are told that the Lord wrote He used the “finger of God” and, in the first instance, He committed it in stone no doubt to illustrate the infallibility, inerrancy, and indestructibility of His Words (Exod.31:18; John 8:6). This was despite there being various forms of writing material already available, but the stone represents a permanent quality that cannot be erased or modified (Matt. 7:24). God reveals that the Bible is classed with a very few realities which will endure forever (Matt 5:18). God also made clear that we are to be “mindful always of his covenant; the word which he commanded to a thousand generations” (1Chron 16:15). Eternal endurance is promised to the Bible, as it truly is the Indestructible Book.
It is startling the confusion Satan has sown worldwide through liberalism, higher criticism, cults, and false religions, especially in the last one hundred years on the infallible nature of Holy Scripture. This has been especially notable since the advent of the printing presses and the ubiquitous availability of the complete Bible to all since our beloved King James translation in 1611. The church has historically held fast to the Word, not only as given by divine inspiration but also as preserved throughout the ages. However, a new view has crept into the Church, which has relegated the authentic text to the autograph originals only. Until the eighteenth century challenge of evolution by scientific rationalism, the almost universal view of the Christian world was that the Earth was only a few thousand years old. Likewise, the Church held to the historic doctrine of the perfect inspiration and preservation of the Words of God in all ages until challenged by rational textual criticism.
Historic Fundamentalism may be moving away from these doctrines, but this not the historic position of believers and the Reformation. This new view is around 100-150 years old, like the age of the Charismatic movement, rejection of ex nihilo creation, and the critical text. Charles Hodge pertinently observed, “It would be a lamentable spectacle to see the Church changing its doctrines or its interpretations of Scripture, to suit the constantly changing representations of scientific men as to matters of fact[2].” Probably the greatest sign of the decline of the Church has been the attack on the doctrine of Scriptural Preservation and the King James Version in the postmodern zeistgeist. Rome, along with post-Enlightenment thought, has now captured even Fundamentalism, at least concerning the Greek New Testament texts. However, giants of the past like Dean Burgon state the historic position,
I am utterly disinclined to believe, so grossly improbable does it seem — that at the end of 1800 years, 995 copies out of every thousand, I suppose, will prove untrustworthy, and that one, two, three, four, or five which remain, whose contents were till yesterday as good as unknown, will be found to have the secret of what the Holy Spirit originally inspired. I am utterly unable to believe, in short, that God’s promise has so entirely failed, that at the end of 1800 years, much of the text of the Gospel had in point of fact to be picked by a German critic out of a waste paper basket in the convent of St. Catherine.
The intellectual and preaching giant, C.H. Spurgeon also declared the Authorized Version “will never be bettered, as I judge, till Christ shall come[3]” but his opinion is swept aside by the new generation of Fundamentalists. Critical Text (CT) advocates have no ultimate and certain standard for determining objective truth. Fortunately, most CT advocates of the past were better believers than theologians and have been able to live with the inherent contradiction of their system by simply declaring the gospel from the Received Text. This has now been challenged by the belligerent approach of the new breed of CT adherents and multiplication of translations and the latest edition of the evolutionary Greek Text.
The annual Congress on Fundamentalism held at Tabernacle Baptist Church in Virginia Beach, Virginia, on October 22-29, 1978 passed the following resolution signed by FBF President Dr Rod Bell, Dr Gilbert Stenholm of BJU, Dr. Arno Weniger, Jnr. of Maranatha Baptist Bible College, Dr Ian Paisley, and Dr Bob Jones Jr.,
That we recommend the use and distribution of only the King James Version of the Bible in English and only those foreign language versions and translations which have been faithfully translated by those committed to the verbal inspiration of the Holy Scripture[4].
The Fundamental Baptist Fellowship (FBF) used to stand unequivocally against all Bible versions produced by liberals. In their 1984 Resolutions they state,
We condemn paraphrases such as The Living Bible and Good News for Modern Man and the products of unbelieving and liberal scholarship such as the Revised Standard Version and the New English Bible.
We deplore the rash of new versions which add to or delete from the Word of God, such as the New International Version, with special reference to those so-called “revisions” which by footnote additions undermine the text.
We recognize the unique and special place of the Authorized King James Version, providentially preserved by God in the English-speaking world[5].
The one consistent trend in all the varied errors, deviations and heresies that has afflicted the Church in the past three hundred years is that their advocates will first criticize the standard received edition or translation of Scripture. The Institutional Church has now publicly given up on having an agreed “text” of the Scriptures and attacks on the historic view of perfect preservation and the KJV are now common place. Even professed Fundamentalists take great pride today in fervently arguing that God did not perfectly preserve His Words, leaving us with an uncertain errant text. The logic of this is that God failed to guide His people to know and keep His words and failed to make it available for all generations, despite what He promised to do. They argue for “essential preservation” but the word “essential” means only pertaining to or constituting the essence of a thing. Tolerance is the cry for all views on this issue yet we forget that Christ rebuked a Church for tolerating a Jezebeel in its midst. Tragically, the Church is being destroyed from within as Cicero Marcus Tullius, born on 3 January, 106 BC and murdered on 7 December, warned of a nation in 43 BC in the Roman Senate,
A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear[6].
Speaking of God and the preservation of Scripture, Central Baptist Theological Seminary President, Kevin Bauder[7] tries to argue the Lord is indifferent as to His Words as Bauder claims, “He might preserve some words and He might permit some to be lost, depending upon His own purpose[8].” BJU professor, Stewart Custer speaking at Marquette Manor Baptist Church in Chicago in 1984 said that God preserved His Word buried, “in the sands of Egypt[9].” Larry Oats of Maranatha Baptist College in Wisconsin, an institution under Dr Myron Cedarholm that formerly argued for the fact of the preserved Word of God in the King James Version[10], claims, “God could have preserved His Word but history proves He did not[11].” William D. Barrick of The Master’s Seminary argues,
Traditionally the church has declared its belief that the preservation of the Scriptures is the result of God’s providential activity. God must have a role in the preservation of His Word if it is to be kept inviolate. The active preservation of theScriptures is necessary because the sinful nature of mankind is antagonistic to God and His Word. Such antagonism breeds both contempt for Scripture and the neglect of Scripture. It is fully within the capacity of sinful mankind to allow the Word to perish and to alter its wording intentionally or unintentionally[12].
But he then paradoxically concludes, “The responsibility for preservation in this world rests squarely upon human shoulders[13].”
Paul W. Downey of Temple Baptist Church writing in God’s Word in Our Hands claims, like the Neo-Orthodox, “God’s Word transcends written documents, even the physical universe, and will be completely and ultimately fulfilled if not one copy remains. The power and effectiveness and duration of the Word of God, and man’s responsibility to obey it, do not demand the presence or even the existence of any physical copy.” Downey also wrote, “The essential message of Scripture has been preserved not only in the Byzantine text-type, but in the Alexandrian text-type as well; the K.J.V. is the Word of God as well as the NASB[14].” Later he writes, “Some among us believe the Bible makes no direct promise of its own preservation, that it only implies it by inference[15].” With tongue firmly in cheek, Bob Jones, III (then President of Bob Jones University) on the back cover of the same publication writes concerning the thrill of knowing we have just the general concepts or message from God today,
Like a clean-edged sword, God’s Word in our Hands cuts through the current confused and schismatic clatter on the subject of biblical preservation. These conservatives and God-fearing authors do the church great service by presenting us with soul-thrilling evidence of the reliability and durability of the eternal Word.
However, as Dr D A Waite writes in reviewing God’s Word in Our Hands,“There are over 5,255 manuscripts. If God’s “Word” is “in our hands,” how can it be both “in our hands” and also all over the world in these 5,255 manuscripts? That is impossible[16].” It is little wonder with such men in leadership in Fundamental schools and churches that God gave His prophets the warning of a famine of God’s Words in the last days (Amos 8:11).
RIDICULE OF PERFECT PRESERVATION
To stand for perfect preservation is arrogantly dismissed as adopting the Bible’s faith-view in order to escape from the “fact” that textual criticism has shown that God did not preserve all of His Words and make them generally available in every generation. These truculent critics ridicule anyone who exalts the authority of the written Word over the authority of liberal “scholarship.” Many adopt the methodology of the evolutionists who figured that the best way to insulate their doctrines from scrutiny is to prevent a debate from ever beginning in the first place by ridiculing your opponents as “fideistic” and demanding that “religious presuppositional” views must not mix with “science.” CT advocates refuse to disclose their presuppositions since they are aware that revealing the bases for the radical beliefs will make their arguments vulnerable to a Biblical challenge. Their books have verbose theological presuppositions to account for canonicity and inspiration of the Words of Scripture but are strangely silent concerning preservation. They adopt the same rationalistic accommodation with “science” as Davis Young in The Biblical Flood where he rejects the historic interpretation of the Universal Flood by arguing,
As we have seen, the idea of a universal deluge was the settled interpretation of the church for nearly seventeen centuries, but that has changed as a body of compelling evidence undercutting that interpretation gradually accumulated. The cumulative pressure of general revelation can be ignored for only so long[17].
In a summary response to Young’s theories, Marvin Lubenow correctly retreats to the orthodox Biblical presuppositional literal hermeneutic,
Davis Young is correct in saying that harmonization based on the old earth-old Adam position has failed. Because he does not recognize that his data has been placed in a philosophic framework alien to Genesis, he has nowhere else to go. He is suggesting that “…the Bible may be expressing history in nonfactual terms…” There is a name for nonfactual history: fiction. However, Young clearly does not intend to imply that. Hence, his words convey no information. We see the frustrations of a man who is utterly sincere in wanting to maintain biblical integrity but is unable to extricate himself from, the man-made philosophic framework of earth history[18].
These textual critics are removing the “ancient landmarks” concerning preservation and replacing them with a rationalistic system of logic. Although they cry “fideistic presupposition” at us, we may point out that they are presupposing that God has not done what He promised to do with unbiblical and revisionist logic. Their fideism is not in God, but in man through a supposedly neutral, scholarly, and scientific means to restore as closely as possible to what the original text of the Bible was. They are effectively removing the concept of Divine revelation, as an operative concept, from Christian epistemology. It is ironic that one side of the debate is unfairly accused of engaging in fideism, when the reality is that both sides are working from the same fundamental conviction. However, we must always draw our conclusions about the evidence by means of the presuppositions. Presuppositions are not disconnected from evidence, but the interpretation of the evidence must always come from the presuppositions.
A typical statement is that of Gerald Priest, Professor of Historical Theology at Detroit Baptist Theological Seminary,
Many “evangelical” heresies are simply the old ones with new names, e.g., Open Theism, a form of Pelagianism (Clark Pinnock, Greg Boyd); Man-centered soteriology, a form of Semi-Pelagianism (Charles Finney, Dave Hunt); Self-esteemism, a form of Gnosticism (Robert Schuller), Annihilationism, a form of Socinianism (Clark Pinnock, John Stott) and King James-onlyism, a relatively new heresy in response to numerous Bible versions (Peter Ruckman, Donald Waite, David Cloud), to name a few[19].
This view has become so pervasive in fundamentalism that it is perhaps the most divisive issue in the history of the movement. Concerned fundamentalist theologians and pastors have been offering correctives but leading proponents of KJV-onlyism have remained unconvinced and obdurate[20].
One ad hominem tactic these groups use is to label you a “Ruckmanite.” However, as one TR defender once observed, “A Ruckmanite is what the opponents call you when they are losing the argument.” Another old canard tactic, opponents such as Doug Kutilek, utilise is to say that your belief in preservation is rooted in the thinking of Benjamin Wilkinson, who was a Seventh Day Adventist and published Our Authorized Bible Vindicated in 1930[21]. However, these anti-KJV opponents do not acknowledge that their view is derived from the work of two apostate Anglican scholars and that Wilkinson’s views were rejected by the Adventists who embrace fully the critical theories of Westcott and Hort. Leading Neo-Evangelical critic of the TR,James R. White warns that King James Bible proponents, “undercut the very foundations of the faith itself[22].” BJU Board Member and Fundamentalist Baptist Pastor, Mike Harding also scoffs,